The Last English King

by Julian Rathbone

  Chapter Seven

  ‘So’ said Quint, as the track began to climb away from the olive groves and into a sparse forest of cork oak and ilex, with aromatic shrubs and coarse grass beneath, ‘at eleven years old you began the training that makes a housecarl. That must have been hard.’

  ‘It was at first, but we soon adapted, and once we grew to be comfortable with it, it was a good life.’

  ‘Tell me how it was.’

  Walt thought for a bit.

  ‘First you must understand all was unsettled and on the move for the next two years. We were only a few months in Ireland before news came that Godwin, heartened by reports from Wessex that the thegns preferred him as a Lord to some jumped up Norman, was coming out of Bruges. In fact it was more serious than that. The Bastard William himself had visited London in the Godwins’ absence and many thought Edward had promised him the succession. So. We took ship again, a terrifying business--’

  ‘What were these ships like?’

  ‘As long as from here to that grey-lichened boulder-’

  ‘Twenty, twenty-five paces.’

  ‘No more than three paces across at the middle and less than a pace at the ends. And when they were beached no taller than a tall man in the middle, though they swept to high and pointed ends at prow and stem.

  But in the water, laden, you could, in the middle of the boat, reach down and scoop the water with your hand-’

  ‘How built?’

  ‘Clinker built of oak, each plank nailed with iron nails to the one below, the gaps closed with hards--’

  ‘Hards?’

  ‘The coarser fibres from flax. They have to be picked out of the softer fibres from which linen is made.’

  ‘Ah, oakum. Which was then covered with pitch made from pine trees?’

  ‘That’s right. Though shipwrights also obtained a similar substance from the outcrops of coal-rock that occur in Kent. Then there was a deck set above the hold where cargo or ballast was stored -- in our case, arms for the most part such as we did not actually carry and wear above the deck and some provisions in case an adverse wind got up; transverse benches for the oarsmen, twelve or so to each side, a mast and a big red sail often emblazoned with a Lord’s device or something threatening like Raven the Land-Waster. As well as the oarsmen, who were of course housecarls themselves, there could be up to another thirty or so men on board, or horses to provide mounts for some of the oarsmen. In calm water with a gentle breeze blowing the right way it could be very pleasant. Even without a breeze it was fun so long as you were still too young to man an oar, but in a swell even, let alone a storm, they were hell.’

  ‘But a hell seaworthy enough to get you across the Irish sea.’

  ‘Just.’

  ‘But you English, and especially the Danes and Norsemen amongst you, pride yourselves on your sea-faring qualities. Could you not have designed and made something a touch larger and more reliable?’

  ‘I suppose so. But what people do not realise is that these ships were expendable, throw-away vessels. Each port has its shipwrights whose normal occupation is to make boats for fishing or trade. Such ships are built to last with copper nails that do not rust, built on a frame of seasoned wood. They are costly to build and costly to keep up unless they are, as it were, earning their livings. So, when a King or an Earl needs fighting ships to defend his coasts or harry those of an enemy, he sends out orders that they should be built and the shipwrights put them together very speedily since they have most of the materials to hand and many already shaped. Their purpose served, those that are still sound are often disassembled and the timbers stored, the iron nails already rusting, thrown away . . .’

  Quint was one who believed that the proper study of mankind is man. He was not interested in the mysteries of the shipwrights’ craft.

  ‘All right, but take me back to the high seas between Wexford and . . .?’

  ‘And Porlock. In Somerset. There was a battle there with the King’s men, thirty thegns were killed, but our ship was somewhat off course, caught by the tide behind the others and we missed it. There were also messengers from Godwin waiting for us - ’

  ‘One thing puzzles me,’ Quint interrupted. ‘Why were you with Harold, whose Earldom was that of Kent, rather than with Godwin Earl of Wessex, who had recruited you in the first place?’

  ‘I’m not sure. But I believe it was because, when we left, Godwin felt his days were numbered -- he wanted Harold to succeed him in Wessex and so surrounded him with Wessex thegns and housecarls. Or maybe our departure was over-hasty and things got muddled. Anyway, these messengers - ’

  ‘I’m sorry. Please go on.’

  ‘These messengers were from Godwin and told how he, Sweyn and Tostig were about to sail along the south coast from east to west, harrying as he went, and ordering Harold to do likewise first to the west along the north Devon and Cornwall coasts, round Land’s End, and then to the east to meet Godwin in Portland Harbour . . .’

  He paused for a moment, and drew breath. The last fifty paces or so had been steeper than the rest and the sun was now hot in their faces.

  ‘Let’s stop awhile,’ Quint suggested. ‘My legs, which are older than yours, are aching. I could, as they say, crush a grape,’ and he pulled a bunch from the bag of woven straw the greengrocer had sold him for a penny.

  They sat on two smooth boulders, looking down over the hills and forest they had walked through, ate grapes, and Quint spat out the pips. ‘They stick between my teeth,’ he said.

  And then:

  ‘This harrying business. It does not seem, if I understand the word correctly, to be the best way of winning friends and influencing them to do your bidding. And presumably what Godwin and the Godwinsons were attempting was to win support in their argument with the King and his Norman entourage.’

  Walt laughed.

  ‘There is, you see,’ he said, ‘harrying and harrying.’

  ‘There is?’

  ‘Nearly always, nowadays, at any rate, it is a way of sending a message, especially when carried on by ships along a coast. In the first place every village with a harbour, every river with an estuary, for that is one thing about these war-boats, with their shallow draught they can often go many miles inland, as many as twenty or thirty in the case of the great rivers of our land, anyway, every port and estuary mouth has coast guards who watch out for raiding parties. Thus warned, the towns around put themselves into a state of defence: the nearer villagers flock within the walls of the burghs good King Alfred caused to be built, taking their herds and valuables with them, while the more distant ones hide in the hills or forests. The worst the raiders can now do is burn a few crops and farmsteads, unless they have sufficient numbers to organise a siege. And sieges take time, time enough for the king or the earl to raise an army and come to the rescue.’

  ‘So what was the point of Godwin’s and the Godwinsons’ harrying in the summer of ten fifty-two?’

  ‘To see how things stood between them and their erstwhile vassals. They had been stripped of all their titles and no one in England, or anywhere else for that matter, owed them a thing. Indeed, to offer them aid or comfort could be taken as an act of treason. But that did not mean that, when threatened with harrying, and perhaps after seeing a few barns burnt down or whatever, the local thegns could not meet together and offer to buy Godwin off. Thus he collected the funds that were, by almost everyone’s consent, his due anyway. So much was true of Godwin’s company. For us, those of us with Harold, it was a different story.’

  ‘How so?”

  ‘The Cornish are Celts, speak their own language, still practise their old religion openly, and acknowledge the suzerainty of the English crown but grudgingly . . .’ Walt’s eyes grew unfocused again, and presently he stood, and walked about a bit, arriving at a platform of rock above Quint’s head. He stayed there before returning with a shake of his shoulders that displaced the memory of a twelve year-old’s first experience of the savagery of war.

&n
bsp; The fifteen ships turn Godrevy Island and race each other towards the sands just east and north of the estuary, leaving to the west the headland with its hermitage dedicated to the Persian bishop St Ive. Instead they aim for the large and prosperous village of Hale. The swell mounts higher as they close upon the shore, with the brightness of the clear sky above them and the deep blue of the sea beneath. And now the waves surge and roar like wild sea-horses determined to unseat their riders. The sails rattle down, the men ship their oars, only the helmsmen work their great sweeps to hold a true course for if their ship goes at all across the surf then surely it will go over. The surf thunders in my ears, we are speeding now faster than a horse at full gallop, the wave breaks around us in a great crashing wall of foam and suddenly we bump and skid and grind up the soft white sand as yet another breaker smashes over the stem and rushes through us like a wind.

  The men are shouting, roaring and laughing with the joy of this, tossing the salt water out of their hair, jumping over so they can help the last push of the waves to get the ship a few yards further up the strand. Timor takes a tumble, bangs his face on an oar handle and is bleeding from his nose, howling, and refusing to get out of the boat until Eric, our Sergeant-at-Arms, throws him out into the wet soft sand. Down the line one ship has overturned and snapped its mast. Harold Godwinson is raging at the helmsman and telling him he’ll have to bear the cost of a new one. Fortunately none drowned for if they had the helmsman would then have had to pay the drowned man’s wergild.

  Some of the men are now shrugging themselves into mail corselets, but most don’t bother - shields, swords and axes are enough and all are eager now to climb the dune in front of us and walk along the crest the half mile which will bring us to Hale. The men, three hundred or so, scramble up the loose sand, slithering and laughing at the slipperiness of it and, with Harold and his Raven standard in their midst, are soon moving at a slow run along the skyline. We boys follow with Wulfric in front, I’m on his heels, doing our best to catch up, but, encumbered with clubs and round shields as we are and with our clothes sodden, we trip and tumble more often than we should.

  Soon the dune becomes a dyke keeping the sea from fields and marsh land on the other side and we see a small settlement below us, a hall thatched with reeds from the marsh, some stunted apple-trees, two substantial bowers, some hovels or barns and a wattle fence around the whole. Eight or so of the men break away from the main body, down the side of the dyke, smash their way through the fence, set hens scurrying in every direction and a dog to bark at the end of his tether. They break into the hall and, just as we boys come level with it, two come out with firebrands which they hurl into the thatch. Red flames blossom along the root tree.

  ‘Come on,’ cries Wulfric, and he charges in bounding leaps down the turved slope. I hesitate, but follow, and three or four other lads do too.

  Inside the hall which is dark and filled with smoke, one Cornishman, small, dark and with the big black beard all Cornishmen wear, is not quite dead though his head is half off- I can see the white rings of his wind-pipe and the snapped tendons of his neck. Another is trying to put his guts back where they belong through the hole left by a slashing sword blow. At the far end of the hall an old man with a white beard and wearing a long jerkin stands in front of an old woman, a younger one and two girls about my age. He has a big two-handed sword and, filled with the war madness, is howling with rage.

  The eight men facing him watch him for a moment with narrowed eyes, then one then others hurl their axes before rushing in with flailing swords. Within a moment the old man is chopped, literally, to pieces. Then they seize the women and drag them kicking, screaming, biting, tearing with their nails down the hall to the doorway just as the flaming roof timbers and sheaves of blazing rushes drop about their heads.

  Out in the yard the men rip the women’s clothes from their backs right down to sheer nakedness and then tumble them about in the earth and chicken shit and falling ashes, taking them any which way they can but mostly from behind as if they were bitches. But one of the girls breaks free. She has black hair and elfin features and she sprints for the fence like a whippet. Wulfric, throwing aside his shield, is after her, catches her leg as she rolls over the fence and tumbles after her. I hear her screams and dash round by the hole the men made in the fence to see how he tries to straddle her but on his own he cannot master her. She has his hair in one hand, is scratching his face with the other and her knee is in his groin. But he still has his club, a heavy baton of seasoned and polished ash in his right hand and somehow he manages to jab the end fiercely in her face. Her grip slackens and he pulls free enough to hit the side of her head, then filled with war-rage and war-lust he kneels and stoops above her and batters her head and shoulders with the club until she screams and moves no more. She is dead and I watched her die. And I watch how Wulfric raises his head and crows like a rooster and I think to myself probably he is relieved to have killed her since he is too young to do what the men are doing to the other women and he would have made a fool of himself had he tried.

  Walt shaded his eyes and peered down the road they had climbed. A mile or so back he could for a moment, before the twisting of the road took it out of view beneath the trees, discern a figure cloaked and cowled in some dark stuff. He felt, though could not specifically remember, an instance when it had happened, that this figure was always there, had always been there behind him since that day when he was twelve and had allowed a girl his own age to be battered to death before his eyes.

  Behind him Quint coughed.

  ‘There is, or so I was told in Nicomedia, a spring just below the watershed on the further side where the water is renowned for its purity and sweetness. I think we should try to reach it by nightfall.’

  Walt pulled himself together.

  ‘Of course,’ he muttered.

  ‘We’ve wandered well away from where our conversation started this morning,’ Quint went on, shouldering his pack as he did so, pulling the brim of his leather hat over his eyes, and picking up his staff with gourd attached. ‘You were, you know, about to tell me how you were trained to be a warrior and a housecarl.’

  ‘Yes. And you are right to make the distinction. The warrior side of it was straightforward enough.’ Walt tell into step beside his companion and continued. ‘First we had to be fit. We were taken to a place called Tidworth Camp, north of Sarum, where Eric, our Sergeant-at-arms, saw to that and much else too.

  ‘This was all done in some secrecy, for after the King reconciled with the Godwins, a condition was they should relinquish their private armies, that there should be no armies but the King’s or those commanded in the name of the King. That all should be the King’s men. So it was in this remote fold of the Wiltshire Downs that our initial training took place.

  ‘On the one side Eric built up sheer strength -- he made us walk and run and walk and run for miles and miles across or rather up and down the bare Wiltshire Downs carrying loads carefully chosen always to be a pound or so more than we could manage with any degree of comfort. And on these marches he made us sing or chant: silly ditties like “We hate the Norsemen and they hate us, we all think they’re full of puss,” or “The Scots and Picts are a load of shits, and we’re going to chop them into bits.’”

  ‘But as well as building up sheer strength he saw to it as well that we were fast and agile. One trick was to take us to a forested valley and there, giving us a short start, set Irish wolf-hounds on us. If we were quick enough we’d get to the other side and he’d call them off. If we were not quick enough then we could let ourselves be tree-ed, but that could only be justified if we could show a claw mark in our backs or a bite in the buttocks. He had many other exercises of that sort.

  ‘And then there was weapon training. Basically the proper handling of a shield, how to make an overlapping wall of shields. The skills that make an axe a deadly weapon whether thrown or used to hack and maim. And finally the use of the sword, both to slash and stab. And also,
of course, the proper repair and maintenance of these weapons-’

  ‘No spear or javelin, then.’

  Walt’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘Certainly not,’ he replied. ‘The spear was the arm, as too was the round shield, as opposed to the leaf-shaped shield, of the fyrd, the churls and sokemen.’

  ‘And horsemanship?’

  ‘We had horse-races, we hunted from our horses and went hawking from them, for most lords love both sports, but that has little to do with the warrior side of being a housecarl.’

  ‘Did you not ride horses into battle?’

  ‘No. Of course we rode from one battle to the next but we did not take them into battle.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘A fighting man should stand on his own two feet and exchange blows with his adversary until one or other drops. Besides, good horses are valuable, and can get killed in battle. I saw three die between William the Bastard’s thighs on Senlac Hill. I could scarce afford one horse, let alone three.’

  ‘But. . .’

  ‘If you are going to say they won because they fought from horses, forget it.’

  His face was suddenly suffused with angry blood again and Quint wisely chose not to pursue the subject

  Chapter Eight

  ‘You spoke of the difference between a warrior and a housecarl.

  ‘A warrior without a soul is a mere weapon. The most handsome sword - with a gold pommel set with garnets, with filigree gold on the hilt, a scabbard of gold and garnet bosses, with a well-tempered blade kept bright and sharp and inlaid with the lightning flashes of old Thor - is but a commodity, an article of exchange that can be passed from hand to hand and used for ill as well as good. Such are the warriors who go into the market-place and fight for one lord one day and for his enemy the next . . .’